Entertainment

LongJump APIs and Hosted Storage Solutions

LongJump, the CRM tool we covered a few months back when the company launched at DEMOfall, has a pretty hefty release coming up today, which essentially opens up LongJump more on the development end of things. I spoke with the company's CEO, Pankaj Malvija, about the new options that are being released in LongJump's service earlier this week to learn more. The new release is essentially comprised of a new Database-as-a-Service (DaaS) offering, which provides companies relational database access and storage on-demand.

Very similar to an Amazon S3 storage service, LongJump now offers a place for you to house your web-based applications. The thing with LongJump is that it already provides a CRM tool with integrated application offerings, which can be quite overwhelming to a first time user, just given the breadth of LongJump's options. So in terms of providing a new DaaS for its users, I was curious about how this additional integration would play out. Malviya explained that it presents an improved and much more integrated option for business to create in-house applications to improve a company's workflow, as well as the applications that are used on their consumer ends.

With the new DaaS offering, LongJump is offering up a set of REST APIs, and actually eliminating the need for developers to have to deal with the user interface of a particular application utilized within LongJump. This simplifies the process, and minimizes a company's need to deal heavily with IT or involve MS Access and other applications that can have their own compatibility issues. Malviya was also very proud to announce that about 3,000 companies are now using LongJump, creating mashups, etc.

So I also asked about the way in which companies would use the new DaaS option, and how it differs from large and small companies. Going back to the benefits of using the DaaS in the first place, larger companies that have more cumbersome IT departments can use LongJump as a more nimble, flexible option, while smaller businesses can sill develop applications without having to pour as many resources into the development as previously thought necessary.

Why is LongJump doing this? The introduction of these additional development tools not only helps to resolve compatibility issues that a developer may have in creating applications on a third-party server, but it also encourages companies to create more applications for use on LongJump. More applications on LongJump means more success for the company overall. It could be likened to Facebook offering storage for its developers, which is an actual possibility for Facebook developers as well.

As we've seen with MindTouch, the presentation of integrated storage solutions specifically to the end of application development and deployment is a growing option for web-based services presenting themselves as a tool for business and consumer use. The need for customized options on the front- and backend is evident with such upgrades to these services, and even Salesforce has begun to head down this path, with the introduction of custom social networking tools for its users to create communities on its own platform.

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